In The Blood

Have you ever looked at your blood under a microscope? What do you imagine you’d find there? All your little red blood cells whizzing around like an episode of “The Magic School Bus?” While it wasn’t quite a Ms. Frizzle-worthy magical experience, I do feel like I learned quite a lot from seeing the life-giving liquid under magnification.

Over the weekend, my mom took me to her “Natural Health Specialist.” I was about to write “doctor,” but technically, she doesn’t have an M.D. and this is usually where you start questioning how much of a snake-oil salesman someone like this might be. But she won over my mom, who had official labs come back with a fatty liver and high liver enzymes about a year ago. With Mrs. H’s help (and a WHOLE bunch of supplements), she was able to effectively get her enzymes back to normal without changing her diet or exercise (which admittedly for health reasons, she still needs to do, but *baby steps*). So because of my mysterious chronic illness issues (as you might have seen in one of my YouTube videos) and some of my symptoms resurfacing after several years of relief while on prescription vitamin D, my mom decided to make me an appointment with Ms. H. And while I was still somewhat skeptical, I didn’t think it could hurt.

Ultimately, what ended up happening was having a very visual representation of some of my problems by looking at my blood. Many of my red blood cells were clumped together (ideally they should be separated and moving around). You could see where many of the cells had white centers, which means they weren’t properly absorbing nutrients. There were ones that had pointed edges which mean I’m not properly absorbing protein either. There were little uric acid crystals, candida yeast, and toxins that looked like little yellow bits of broken glass, mostly likely leaking from my colon and/or liver. And plenty of parasites. (Though Ms. H assured me that everybody has parasites, it’s kind of part of being human). While I didn’t know what a lot of these terms were at first, it was still easy to tell just by looking that my blood didn’t look like something that would be in a biology textbook under “healthy human blood.”

As someone who’s been suffering from weird and unexplainable symptoms since 2008, symptoms that doctors tend to brush off as either exaggeration (if I have no definitive proof at the time of a check-up) or as the catch-all Fibromyalgia, it was both relieving and terrifying to be able to look at my blood under a microscope and see pretty easily that yes, something’s NOT right here. At the same time, I start to have the mini-panic attack of “How do I fix this? Am I broken forever? Have I ruined my body?”

Ms. H seemed pretty confident that I hadn’t ruined my body yet. And with a boatload of disgusting tasting supplements, I’m planning to test this whole “natural health” thing over the next month. Perhaps it’s all hooha! Or maybe something in there could help me out along with my gradual shift of diet and exercise. Who knows? It’s things like this that make me remember that life is really all one grand experiment as we learn how best to treat our bodies.